Project Outline
VetDoc is a veterinary knowledge base and cooperation platform that offers advanced veterinarian/vet clinic search. This website’s goal is to simplify the process of searching for a veterinarian in your area and to promote knowledge sharing between professionals and animal owners. The veterinarian database currently contains veterinarians from France, but over time it will be extended with other countries, like Switzerland, Belgium, Germany, etc.
The client requested the sophistication in architecture and the simplicity in user interaction. So Quintagroup stood up for a challenge.
Quintagroup Solution
Following the best practice guidelines, the VetDoc platform is constructed of two parts:
- Veterinarian search allows searching for veterinarian or vet clinic by name, specialty or area, offering even results in a 5-25 km radius (based on Google map integration). Veterinarians can be added to user profile so that their contact and educational information is at your tips. Veterinarians themselves can update information presented on their website profiles.
- Articles in the form of a blog are added by the site administrators. They can be shared, added to favorites, and commented on.
Quintagroup created a website design, provided its responsiveness and accessibility. Search and account management are user-friendly yet powerful. The current database contains over 20 000 veterinarians and over 10 000 clinics. PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch are scalable and ready to be filled in with even larger numbers of profiles.
In order to further ensure increased cooperation with the end users, VetDoc offers collaboration with the VetPharm website and its animal health management center. Our team developed an API so that users can log into the Vetpharm website with the VetDoc credentials. VetPharm allows veterinarian search and article listing. Veterinarians added to the profile on VetDoc will be also available on VetPharm and can be later added to prescriptions, dispensing, etc.
VetDoc’s tech stack
The key priorities of this website were speed, reliability, and accessibility. Our team built the software architecture from the ground up using performance-driven open source software. After a thorough investigation, the following instruments were chosen to serve the demanded features:
- Django - Python web framework is the core solution of this project;
- Elasticsearch - powerful data search tool together with data visualization plugin Kibana;
- PostgreSQL - the VetDoc's database;
- Chausette - WSGI server;
- Googlemaps integration;
- Django-taggit - reusable Django library for working with tags (used with Articles);
- Django Rest Framework assisted with developing REST API;
- Ansible facilitated the deployment process;
- React - front-end library for interactive page development;
- Grunt - CSS file compilation library;
- LESS - CSS pre-processor;
- Webpack - JS files compilation and building instrument;
- Buildbot - CI/CD tool;
- Pytest - a convenient framework for functional testing.
Quintagroup is a seasoned provider of web solutions and can give expert advice to assist your business or organization online. Contact us today to learn more.